PowerCinema very slow to load

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juliant

96 posts

Master Geek

#22784 8-Jun-2008 08:57

Well since for some reason Media Portal didn't want to work with my Vista PC, I used the PowerCinema 5.0 that came with the Hauppauge T500 stick. Patched it to the 2nd from last version as recommended. Sound worked without having to load the sound patch.

I then went and bought a 8600GT card. Applied the tweaks to get hardware acceleration working and this also worked.(I assume it has CPU usage has gone down but not as low as some people report - PowerCinema is using around 15% with CPU overall around 25-30% maybe a bit more in TV3. Previously TV3 was 90-95%

Everything seems to run pretty good once the TV channel comes in and changing channels is reasonably quick. The windows media centre remote seems to just work with PowerCinema too, without me actually installing any software or doing anythig.

However my problem is that when you first click on TV it takes an age to bring up the channel - I'm talking 3 or 4 minutes. Is this normal? Likewise if I switch to composite (to watch Sky channels) it takes an age also but comes up eventually. What load times are others experiencing? Guess I could try a fresh install. Maybe initially installing MyTV confused things?

Another annoyance is if I want to watch TV (Sky) in Vista Media Centre, if I click live TV on the remote it launches power cinema (which then hangs). Couldnt google an answer to this although found others that had the same issue.

juliant

96 posts

Master Geek

#137216 11-Jun-2008 04:45

Well I installed AAC patch and changed my connection to optical digital rather than analog and for some reason this had the added bonus of fixing my slow load times - now it takes a few seconds rather than minutes. Still some work to do though because I cant get sound playing anything through windows media player - I have to use PowerCinema to get sound....anyone have any ideas?

DS248

1691 posts

Uber Geek

Lifetime subscriber

#137672 12-Jun-2008 17:50

juliant: ... Still some work to do though because I cant get sound playing anything through windows media player - I have to use PowerCinema to get sound....anyone have any ideas?

We have similar issues with WMP & .mpg files recorded by PowerCinema.

On my PC (Vista64 Business) WMP will not play the files period (despite having registered mmaacd.ax & the PC H.264 codec).
On two other PC's (Vista64 Home Premium & a ~3yr old, single core cpu XP Pro laptop), WMP plays the video, but with no audio.
Have also tried VLC on the latter two machines without success.

I have given up trying with WMP & instead (today) installed smplayer (free, GPL). With zero manual configuration, it has worked flawlessly (video & audio) on both my PC & the XP laptop with TV recorded as .mpg from TV1 & the HD Preview channel (video files stored on my PC). The laptop played them over the network without any problems. Not tested on other PC's yet.

It seems to choke on recordings ex TV3, but at this point I have not attempted to tweak anything (drop-down menus or otherwise). There is a drop-down menu item for de-interlacing with several options, but I have not looked into it yet. Also, there are a heap of additional codecs I downloaded from link above but have not installed or even looked at them yet.

I assume recordings ex other channels should be OK but have not yet tested that.

juliant

96 posts

Master Geek

#138093 15-Jun-2008 05:22

Actually turned out my issue was a very basic one - in the sound properties in control panel, I had speakers selected as default rather than spdif. Would have cottoned on to this sooner if I had been getting no sound at all, but because Powercinema was giving me sound I didnt twig to it straight away. So now I have sound in VMC and WMP as well as Powercinema